Tuesday, 12 May 2015

Improving your Basic Reading Comprehension Skills: Useful techniques

Please refer to the May 6th post (Requisite basic skills for comprehension) and then, go through the answers and the worked-out thought processes in answering the following two questions, out of the five found at the end of the post. The worked out examples and suggested answers to the remaining three questions can be found in the May 13 blog post in The Pear Tree website.


Questions:

1.     Why did the author decide not to tell the doctor what is `the matter' with him?

I said: "I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me.

Often, we look for contextual clues in the sentences that come either before or after the reference found in the question.  Here, the clues lie in the sentences that come before the reference made to not telling him what is `the matter with him (refer to the highlighted texts).

Answer: The author feels that his medical problems are too many and hence, would take too much of the doctor's precious time, which is already limited in its short span.

2.     What does the `it' refer to when the author mentioned that he `came to discover it all'?

He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each."... Why I have not got housemaid's knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got."
And I told him how I came to discover it all.

Again, the clues lie in the sentences that come before the `it' is mentioned in the passage (refer to the highlighted texts).

Answer: The `it' refers to the knowledge that, excluding housemaid's knee, he had all the diseases.


Coming Soon: Our diagnostic quiz that allows you to test your comprehension skills and discover your level of comprehension, thus enabling you to decide on the kind of help you would need to improve in your reading comprehension skills.

No comments:

Post a Comment